


A Powerful, Ugly Creature

by executrix



Category: Firefly
Genre: Episode Tag, Episode: s01e09 Ariel, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-13
Updated: 2012-10-13
Packaged: 2017-11-16 05:06:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/535837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Ariel, Jayne has to get back into Mal's good graces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Powerful, Ugly Creature

1.  
“Oh, Kaylee, are you OK?” Wash hummed (the words fit to the tune of a popular song, which he strummed on the table).

“Sure,” she said, limping a little as she set down the stewpot of (optimistically) chicken-flavored protein in brown gravy. Zoe put the casserole full of hominy on the trivet, next to the bowl of soy sprouts with ginger dressing. “Thought I knew every inch of this ship good enough not to even put the light on when I put them cable ties in that storage room. Didn’t even remember we had that ambulance in there.”

She winced, reminiscently, thinking of hitting her knee and then tripping and hitting her head on the side of the ambulance. “Can’t believe that nobody bought that off us, all this time,” Kaylee said. “Wash, you did a real good job, buildin’ that.”

“It was mostly you,” Wash said gallantly.

“Wonder if it’d still run?” Kaylee said.

“What’d you want the fool thing for?” Mal said. “We should probably just dump it, next stop.” 

Jayne winced, reminiscently.

2.  
“We’d give you a share, of course,” Simon said, twirling a lock of Inara’s hair around his fingers. “A few waves, a little bit of sewing, less than an hour in all. I don’t think there’d be any risk to you. Well, not much more than the background radiation level of risk.”

Inara re-settled her head on Simon’s shoulder. “Would Nuevissima Sevilla fit your criteria?” she said. “I know some…” (she stopped before “clients”) “…people there.”

“It’s not Core,” Simon said thoughtfully. “But it has pretensions…we could get there easily enough…and get away again, quickly. 

The main question is whether there’s a prominent endocrinologist who has offices in the hospital.”

3.  
“Ain’t fair,” Jayne said. 

Mal just waited him out. 

“Both of ‘em? You heard how Monty howled ‘bout doin’ that for that red-headed girl, whatever you’d call her.”

“Both of ‘em,” Mal said implacably. “Don’t worry ‘bout the stubble, Doc says that’ll help with the illusion.”

“You think this is such a good idea, you do it,” Jayne said. “Sometimes I wonder about how much you like this kinda stuff anyway. You ain’t that much shorter’n me—plenty tall enough for this—and you wouldn’t even have to shave.”

“I got nothin’ to make up for,” Mal said. “Payback’s a bitch, ain’t it? But you won’t be. You’ll be a sweet, modest little flower. So just shut it and let Zo’ do most of the talkin’.” 

4.  
One of Inara’s regulars was a senior administrator at the hospital, so he was happy to take her Wave. 

“A sad case,” she told him “These old families, obsessed with the purity of the blood…they marry their cousins, because no one else is elite enough for their exclusive standards. It’s dreadful, the poor girl is simply grotesque. I would be very, very grateful if you could strengthen the security around Dr. Czuchry’s office, to protect her privacy and keep the pixelazzi away.” 

5.  
After a long wait past the scheduled appointment time, as the two of them scrolled idly through the oxymoron of long-outdated fashion flatscreens, Dr. Czuchry was at last ready to see his aristocratic new patient.

“She’s the spit and image of her Daddy,” the duenna said. She was a tall woman (although dwarfed by her hulking charge), draped in a widow’s respectable black bombazine. Her black lace mantilla fell gracefully from a simple shell comb. “During his lifetime, there was no question of seeking any…amelioration. But he is now with his ancestors, and now Dona Ines hopes that there might be some treatment. Drugs, perhaps surgery. So that she can be as other women. Marry, and perhaps have sons to carry her ancestry forward.” 

Dr. Czuchry blinked. It was hard to tell. Not only did his new patient wear the conventional mantilla, in this case fastened with a mother-of-pearl comb that cruelly exaggerated her height, she wore a veil pinned across her face. All that was visible was a pair of dull grey-blue eyes, and the merest suggestion of sun-darkened, pitted skin glimpsed through the veil. It seemed likely that, even if a husband could be found desperate for ancestry and dowry, her childbearing years were past From time to time, Dona Ines opened the ivory fan in her lap, and fluttered it in a frightful parody of coquetry. Her sprigged muslin dress exaggerated the flatness of her bosom. Its sleeves stopped short of her wrists, further accentuating their huge size and coarseness. The mode called for delicate black velvet pumps, but Dr. Czuchry could easily imagine that the thick-soled boots were the only things that could be found to cover those vast hooves. 

Shuddering, Dr. Czuchry turned with relief to the familiar safety of the medical record that had been waved to his Cortex terminal. Minutes slipped by as he read through the copious notes, forming and discarding one hypothesis after another. 

At last he looked up, and pointed to the screen in the corner of the room, behind which lurked an examining table. “Dona Ines, please disrobe and put on the paper gown that you find there. Of course, your duenna may remain outside the screen to ensure that there is no impropriety, or I can summon a nurse for the same purpose.” 

Dona Ines rose from the seat to her full height. Dr. Czuchry blinked. Dona Ines’ fan flapped back and forth over her face tachycardically. A shrieking squeak emerged. “I ain’t—uh, isn’t—never heard nothin’ so immodest in my entire ladylike life!” 

An octave lower, her duenna murmured, “But surely that will not be necessary, doctor?…with all those records that have been sent to you…?”

“Senora, that is not how science operates. I must see for myself…”

“We’re outta here!” declared Dona Ines, suiting the action to the word.

The security personnel, clerks, and nurses who had gathered in the waiting room and the nearby corridor parted like the Red Sea. After a few minutes, they decided that the show was over, and since it was time for shift change anyway most of them went home.

6.  
“All right?” Mal asked.

“Sure,” Zoe said. “You?”  
Mal jerked his head (topped with a natty long-billed cap) toward the back of the ambulance. The stretchers were stacked with cartons. “Simon was a tad huffy about my bein’ tidy, said that if I didn’t make a pig’s dinner outta the storeroom this time, they’d never even know they got jacked. So I kept the shelves neat, stacked the stuff up on the hand truck, high enough to cover up my face on the cameras, and had that bill of sale River printed up stickin’ out the top of the pile.” He launched the ambulance.

“How ‘bout the card? That was the weak link last time.”

“One of ‘em,” Mal said. 

“Hey!” Jayne said, tugging at the comb until the mantilla and veil came away. He flexed his shoulders until the muslin ripped, pulled off the sleeves, and wriggled around inside his lap belt the bodice came apart. He reached into his reticule for his cigar case and lit a cigar. 

“Card was fine,” Mal said. “Girl’s considerable of a hacker, says she can get admin privileges for any health care system.” 

7.  
Inara applied a last coat of mascara and checked to see that she had the season’s latest nail polish colors in her pedicure kit. Her contact at the Interplanetary Red Sun was a valuable new client. And a foot fetishist. After a final check to see that the cartons of medicine were securely stowed, she launched the air ambulance.

The IRS couldn’t afford to pay top dollar, but its burn rate for medicine and equipment meant that they wouldn’t look too closely at sourcing. Even the Fed realized that the good the organization did justified a degree of selective myopia. 

“Heading out now, Wash,” Inara said over the Comm. “Ten a.m. pickup with my shuttle still suitable?”

“A-OK,” Wash said.

She would need a ride back, because Dr. Thirlwell had also bought the ambulance. 

8.  
“’Nother good plan of Simon’s,” Mal said. 

“Call that a new plan? I say, more’ve a rerun,” Jayne said. Mal had a canvas bag in his hand, and Jayne wondered if they were going to do that thing again where you throw the money in the middle of the bed and roll around.

Mal gave him a steely stare. “Yeah, except this time Zoe was keepin’ an eye on you so there weren’t no slip-ups.”

“And Simon’s here sittin’ on his rich butt doin’ nothin’ while we was puttin’ our head in the lion’s mouth.”

“Can’t see why you’re frosted off at him, ‘steada the other way ‘round,” Mal said.

“First time he got here, saw you lookin’ him up, down, and mostly middle. Thought you was enamoured of an ass.”

“That is categorically the last Shakespeare play I ever take you to,” Mal said.

“Lyin’ sonsabitches. Put on the bill that it’s about a bottom, just to get you hot,” Jayne said.

“Anyway, what you’re bitchin’ about, that’s just lookin’. How come every time my back is turned you’re off with a gaggle of prostitutes, a group of folks you may have noticed I ain’t that partial to?”

Jayne shrugged. “Man’s got needs, is all.”

“Too bad if you got ‘em now,” Mal said. “I just dropped by to tell you, we did real good on this job. Didn’t take long, got paid right smart, and nobody got so much as a splinter.”

“Shiny! What’s my cut?”

“Well, that’s what I’m here to tell ya. You don’t get one, I’m givin’ yours to River.” 

“What for? She did even less than her lazy-ass brother. If you’re still carryin’ on about that thing, already said I was sorry.”

“You did not. Said you didn’t want to look bad after I killed you. Way I look at it, that ain’t much of an apology.”

“Did it for you, anyways. We’re always gonna get in trouble, them two draggin’ on us like a chain gang.”

“That is the boniest thing ever entered your head, Jayne. What’d you think, after they hauled ‘em away they’d give me a medal for hidin’ ‘em? More likely shoot us all like dogs and steal the ship. Hell, half the reason I let ‘em stay is ‘cause they annoy the Fed, a group of folks to whom I am even less partial than whores.”

“So you ain’t just bustin’ chops? You’re mad at me for your ownself?”

Mal shrugged and nodded.

“Anythin’ I can do to make it up to you?”

“Present to your ownself, more like,” Mal said.  
“  
Well.” Jayne said, thinking that if the next day the thighs under those tight pants had stubble burn, well, whose fault was it anyway demanding the sacrifice of Jayne’s whiskers on the altar of Mal’s fit of pique?

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Inalasahl's 10th Anniversary U-Day Ficathon, for the prompt "Jayne has to get into drag for a job...comedy preferred."


End file.
